“If you were born after 1970, I think it is nearly impossible to imagine how it felt to open up The New York Times Magazine on a Sunday morning in January 1971 to discover ‘What it Means to be a Homosexual,’ a deeply personal and beautifully written piece in defense of homosexuality.” [via New York Review of Books]

In fact, something else occurred: the development of digital computer-generated imagery (CGI). Bazin had imagined cinema as the objective “recreation of the world.” Yet digital image-making precludes the necessity of having the world, or even a really existing subject, before the camera—let alone the need for a camera. Photography had been superseded, if not the desire to produce images that moved. Chaplin was perhaps but a footnote to Mickey Mouse; what were The Birth of a Nation and Battleship Potemkin compared to Toy Story 3?

The history of motion pictures was now, in effect, the history of animation. The process began in the early 1980s with two expensive and much-publicized Hollywood features. One From the Heart (1982), Francis Ford Coppola’s experiment in electronic image-making, returned but $1 million on a $26-million investment and effectively destroyed his studio, while Disney’s Tron (1982) the first sustained exercise in computer-generated imagery, was a movie whose costly special effects and mediocre box-office returns would be credited with (or blamed for) delaying CGI-based cinema for a decade.

Here is the official website for this year’s edition of the Indian Festival of Arts, Kalaa Utsavam, as pointed to by the papers this morning. [via Kalaa Utsavam] It will run from 23 November to 2 December, and feature performances including dance, music, and drama.

It was fundamental to Wittgenstein’s think- ing – both in his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in his later work Philosophical Investigations – that not everything we can see and therefore not everything we can mentally grasp can be put into words. In the Tractatus, this appears as the distinction between what can be said and what has to be shown. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” runs the famed last sentence of the book but, as Wittgenstein made clear in private conversation and correspondence, he believed those things about which we have to be silent to be the most important. (Compare this with the logical positivist Otto Neurath, who, echoing Wittgenstein, declared: “We must indeed be silent – but not about anything.”)

To grasp these important things, we need not to reason verbally, but rather to look more attentively at what lies before us. “Don’t think, look!” Wittgenstein urges in Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical confusion, he maintained, had its roots not in the relatively superficial thinking expressed by words but in that deeper territory studied by Freud, the pictorial thinking that lies in our unconscious and is expressed only involuntarily in, for example, our dreams, our doodles and in our “Freudian slips”. “A picture held us captive,” Wittgenstein says in the Investigations, and it is, he thinks, his job as a philosopher not to argue for or against the ￼￼truth of this or that proposition but rather to delve deeper and substitute one picture for another. In other words, he conceived it as his task to make us, or at least to enable us, to see things differently.

“Life resides in a broken frame. Games must acknowledge this, not try and save us from it.” [via Bit Creature]

“So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence. Within weeks I became lethargic and suffered mild brain damage. I am still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time.” [via Cultso]

On the topic of drugs, here is William James writing to Henry James about using a particular substance. [via Wm & H’ry]

And to round off your week, here is the video for Four Tet’s remix of Ultraísta’s “smalltalk”. [via YouTube]

Omnivore is a regular report on some of the things that I’ve been enjoying during the week (or thereabouts).

I’m realising that this semester, everything that I’m reading outside of schoolwork is not sticking. It just breezes past me, in a way. Sure, I’ve read things that I really liked, revisited books that I love, but not quite with the same… commitment or investment as I normally would. I’m blaming this on school. Too many things to read and far too many things to keep track of.

That said, school is still good for you. Stay in school, kids.

I’m reading Anne Carson’s Decreation right now. I’m going real slow. Not entirely by choice. I think I might pick a different book for next week and leave this at the halfway mark for the time being. That might spark me back into life.